the group

Founded by a small group of philosophers over a grey New Jersey weekend in April 2003, the Moral Psychology Research Group
fosters collaborative interdisciplinary research on human mentation and morality. Topics on which the group is working
include moral reasoning, character, evaluative diversity, moral emotion, positive psychology, moral rules, the neural
correlates of ethical judgment, and the attribution of moral responsibility. This work is everywhere informed by contemporary
empirical research in the biological, social and behavioral sciences, and is frequently informed by our own empirical work
in such areas as development, culture, social cognition, and brain science. A collaboratively authored volume treating these
issues, The Moral Psychology Handbook, appeared with Oxford University Press in June 2010.

people

C. Daryl Cameron is an Assistant Professor of social psychology at the University of Iowa. He is also Fellow at the Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. His research lies at the intersection of psychology and moral philosophy, examining the psychological underpinnings of moral decisions and actions.

Fiery Cushman is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, where he directs the Moral Psychology Research Laboratory.
His research investigates the cognitive mechanisms responsible for human moral judgment, along with their development, evolutionary history and neural basis.
His work often draws from classic philosophical dilemmas, and has focused in particular on the psychology of punishment and the aversion to harmful action.
He received his BA and PhD from Harvard University, where he also completed a post-doctoral fellowship. He served as Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic
and Psychological Sciences at Brown University from 2011 to 2014.

John M. Doris John M. Doris is Professor in the Philosophy–Neuroscience–Psychology Program and Philosophy Department, Washington University in St. Louis.
He works at the intersection of cognitive science, moral psychology, and philosophical ethics, authoring or co-authoring papers for such venues as
Noûs, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Cognition, Bioethics, Journal of Research in Personality, Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology
, and the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. Doris has been awarded fellowships from Michigan’s
Institute for the Humanities, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies,
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities (three times), and is a winner of the Society
for Philosophy and Psychology’s Stanton Prize. He authored Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge, 2002)
and Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency (Oxford 2015). With his colleagues in the Moral Psychology Research Group,
he edited The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, 2010). He is presently beginning a collection of his papers,
Character Trouble:
Undisciplined Essays on Persons and Circumstance
, for Oxford University Press. At Washington University, Doris’ pedagogy has been recognized
with an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Graduate Student Senate and the David Hadas Teaching Award for excellence in the instruction of first year undergraduates.

Jesse Graham received his PhD (Psychology) from the University of Virginia in 2010, a Master's (Religious Studies) from Harvard University in 2002, and a Bachelor's (Psychology) from the University of Chicago in 1998. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, where he hovers menacingly over the Values, Ideology, and Morality Lab. His research interests are in the moral, ideological, and religious convictions that cause so much conflict and yet provide so much meaning to people's lives. He is particularly interested in how ideological and moral values shape behavior outside of conscious awareness, and in how these effects vary across individuals and cultures.

Joshua Greene Joshua Greene is Professor of Psychology, a member of the Center for Brain Science faculty, and the director of the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard University. He studies the psychology and neuroscience of morality, focusing on the interplay between emotion and reasoning in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Gilbert Harman is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author or co-author of nine books, including Explaining Values (Oxford, 2000) and (with Sanjeev Kulkarni) Reliable Reasoning (MIT, 2007), and An Elementary Introduction to Statistical Learning Theory (Wiley, 2011). He has edited or co-edited four others, including Conceptions of the Human Mind (Erlbaum, 1993).

Daniel Kelly is an associate professor in the Philosophy Department at Purdue University. His research interests are at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and moral theory. He is the author of Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, and has published papers on moral judgment, social norms, racial cognition, and cross-cultural diversity.

Joshua Knobe is an associate professor of cognitive science and philosophy at Yale University. Most of his research is in the new field of experimental philosophy. In his work in this field, he has conducted experimental studies about people’s intuitions concerning intentional action, causation, consciousness, group agency,racial prejudice, reason, explanation, freedom, and moral responsibility. Above all, he is interested in the ways in which moral considerations can affect people’s judgments about what seem to be purely scientific questions.

Victor Kumar is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Toronto. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan from 2013-15. Kumar received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Arizona in 2013 and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University and Joshua Greene's Moral Cognition Lab in 2011/12. He has published in Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Analysis, and Synthese. His research lies at the intersection of ethics and cognitive science.

Edouard Machery Edouard Machery is Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University), and an Adjunct Research Professor, Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the philosophical issues raised by psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a special interest in concepts, moral psychology, the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding cognition, modularity, the nature, origins, and ethical significance of prejudiced cognition, the foundation of statistics, and the methods of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He is also involved in the development of experimental philosophy, having published several noted articles in this field. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (OUP, 2009) as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012), La Philosophie Expérimentale (Vuibert, 2012), Arguing about Human Nature (Routledge, 2013), and Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy (Routledge, 2014). He is also the editor of the Naturalistic Philosophy section of Philosophy Compass since 2012.

Ron Mallon is an associate professor and Director of the Philosophy–Neuroscience–Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He has authored or co-authored papers in Cognition, Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Mind and Language, Nous, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy of Science, Social Neuroscience, Social Philosophy, and Social Theory and Practice. His research is in social philosophy, philosophy of cognitive psychology, and moral psychology.

Victoria McGeer is a professor in the Philosophy Department and a Research Scholar in the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University.

Alfred Mele is the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of ten books, including Effective Intentions (2009), Backsliding (2012), and Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will (2014), and over 200 articles and the editor or co-editor of six books. He is past director of the Big Questions in Free Will project (2010-13) and current director of the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control project (2014-17) – multi-million dollar projects featuring collaborative research by scientists and philosophers. Mele’s primary philosophical interests are in various aspects of human behavior.

Maria Merritt is a Core Faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and Associate Professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. She earned her B.S. in Biology from Wake Forest University, her B.A. in Philosophy and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. Merritt completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, she taught philosophy at the College of William and Mary and held a Faculty Fellowship at the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. At Johns Hopkins, Merritt is a faculty affiliate and advisory board member of the Johns Hopkins-Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program. Her current research interests include global health ethics, international research ethics, moral philosophy, and moral psychology. Merritt’s work as an author or co-author includes articles published in AIDS, American Journal of Public Health, Bulletin of the WHO, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Ethics, JAMA, Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, PLoS Medicine, and Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.

John Mikhail is an Associate Dean of Transnational Legal Study and professor at Georgetown Law. His research interests include tors, criminal law, constitutional law, international law, jurisprudence, moral and legal philosophy, legal history, and law and cognitive science. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cornell University and was a Lecturer and Research Affiliate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He received his J.D. from Stanford University.

Eddy Nahmias is Professor of Philosophy and an associate member of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University, where he has initiated programs in neurophilosophy and neuroethics. His research is devoted to the study of human agency: what it is, how it is possible, and how it accords with scientific accounts of human nature. His primary focus is the free will debate. He is co-editor of Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings.

Shaun Nichols holds a joint appointment in philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Arizona. He is author of Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (Oxford, 2004), co-author (with Stephen Stich) of Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretense, Self-awareness and Understanding Other Minds (Oxford, 2003), and co-editor (with Joshua Knobe) of Experimental Philosophy (Oxford, 2008).

Laura Niemi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University working on an interdisciplinary project called The Psycholinguistics of Morality with Dr. Steven Pinker and Dr. Jesse Snedeker. Laura'a doctoral research was advised by Dr. Liane Young at the Morality Lab at Boston College, where she received a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience in 2015. Laura conducts research at the intersection of moral psychology, cognitive science, and psycholinguistics. She aims to increase understanding about when and why people disagree about events being right or wrong. She pursues this through research investigating how social forces — such as ideology and membership in social categories — are reflected in systems of language usage, thought and action. Her papers have appeared in journals including Psychological Science, Psychological Inquiry, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Her popular science writing has appeared in The New York Times, and she writes the Psychology Today blog “Morality in Language.”

Jonathan Phillips is a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at Harvard University. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy and psychology at Yale in 2015. His research has focuses on the psychological representation of possibilities, moral judgment, causal reasoning and theory of mind. In studying these aspects of cognition and their intersection, he draws on frameworks and tools from philosophy, psychology and linguistics.

Alexandra Plakias is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Her research concerns moral psychology, metaethics, and the intersection of the two. She has published papers on moral disagreement and moral relativism, and on the role of disgust in moral judgment.

Jesse J. Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. His research focuses on the perceptual, emotional, and cultural foundations of human psychology. His books include Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perception Basis (MIT, 2002), Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford, 2004), The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford, 2007), Beyond Human Nature (Penguin, 2012), The Conscious Brain (Oxford, in press) and Works of Wonder: A Theory of Art (Oxford, in production). All of his research in the cognitive sciences bears on traditional philosophical questions. Prinz’s work is a contemporary extension of the classical empiricist tradition in philosophy, which emphasizes experience, rather than innate knowledge, and disembodied, amodal representations in thought.

Adina Roskies is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College and has pursued a career in both philosophy and neuroscience. Her research and writing has focused on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics, including neuroethics. She received a Ph.D. in neuroscience and cognitive science in 1995 from the University of California, San Diego, and did a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroimaging at Washington University in St. Louis, using positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). After serving two years as senior editor of Neuron, she went on to complete a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. Dr. Roskies joined the Dartmouth faculty in the fall of 2004. She has been a visiting fellow in philosophy at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. She was a project fellow on the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from National Institutes of Health, the McDonnell–Pew Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Dr. Roskies is the author of numerous articles published in academic journals. She was awarded both the William James Prize and the Stanton Prize by the Society of Philosophy and Psychology.

Timothy Schroeder received his B.A. from the University of Lethbridge and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. After starting his career at the University of Manitoba, he is now Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He works on the philosophy of mind and moral psychology, and these interests intersect in his book, Three Faces of Desire (Oxford, 2004). He also has a forthcoming book with Nomy Arpaly, In Praise of Desire.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Philosophy Department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He is also core faculty in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He received his BA from Amherst College in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982. Walter has served as vice-chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association and co-director of the MacArthur Project on Law and Neuroscience. He and Felipe De Brigard will organize a series of Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy in 2016-2018, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Walter publishes widely in normative moral theory, meta-ethics, applied ethics, moral psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of law, epistemology, informal logic, and philosophy of religion. He has defended atheism, consequentialism, contrastivism, limited moral skepticism, and irresolvable moral dilemmas. His current research focuses on empirical moral psychology and neuroscience (including experiments on psychopaths and on the diversity of moral judgments) and on the implications of neuroscience for the legal system and for free will and moral responsibility (including the responsibility of addicts and people with mental illnesses, including scrupulosity).

David Shoemaker is an associate professor in the Deptartment of Philosophy & Murphy Institute at Tulane University. He is the general editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, and he has published numerous articles on personal identity and ethics, agency and responsibility, and the nature of the moral community. His book Responsibility from the Margins is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Chandra Sripada is the Co-director of the Neuroimaging Methods Core in the Department of Psychiatry and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas, Austin, his M.D. from the University of Texas Medical School, Austin, and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

Stephen P. Stich is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He has written extensively on issues in cognitive science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral theory, and philosophical methodology. Stich is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the first recipient of the American Philosophical Association’s Gittler Award for outstanding scholarly contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences. In 2007, he received the Jean Nicod Prize sponsored by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Nina Strohminger is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale School of Management. She has studied morality as it intersects with emotion, identity, and social behavior. Her papers have appeared in Psychological Science, Science, and Cognition. In her free time, Nina hangs out with philosophers.

Valerie Tiberius is Professor of Philosophy and Chair at the University of Minnesota. Her work explores the ways in which philosophy and psychology can both contribute to the study of well-being and virtue. She is the author of The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits (Oxford 2008), Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge 2015) and numerous articles on the topics of practical reasoning, prudential virtues, well-being, and the relationship between psychology and ethics.

Manuel R. Vargas is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of San Francisco. His work focuses on questions of agency at the intersection morality, psychology, and the law. He also writes about topics in Latin American philosophy. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, which won the APA Book Prize in 2015. He is also a co-author of Four Views on Free Will, and a co-editor of Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman.

Natalia Washington is a McDonnell postdoctoral scholar in the Philosophy Neuroscience and Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Interested in externalist perspectives in philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science, and in understanding the ways in which minds and environments interact, her current research focuses on the theoretic and conceptual foundations of mental health and human nature in the philosophy of psychiatry. She has also done work on implicit bias and moral responsibility, and on the effects of implicit cognition on medical industry interaction with doctors and medical students.

Liane Young is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College. She studies the cognitive and neural basis of human moral judgment, focusing especially on the roles of emotion and mental state reasoning. Her work employs the methods of cognitive neuroscience: functional neuroimaging, studying patient populations with specific cognitive and neural deficits, and modulating activity in specific brain areas using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Young received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 2008, and her B.A. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2004. In 2006 Young was awarded the William James Prize by the Society of Philosophy and Psychology for a paper on moral judgment in patients with brain damage.

publications

Following are some of our publications in moral psychology since the group's inception in 2003.

Mallon, R. & Kelly, D. 2012. “Making Race Out of Nothing: Psychologically Constrained Social Roles,” in H. Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press.

Phillips, J. & Young, L. 2011. “Apparent Paradoxes in Moral Reasoning; Or How You Forced Him to Do It, Even Though He Wasn’t Forced to Do It.” Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Machery, E. 2007. “100 Years of Psychology of Concepts: The Theoretical Notion of Concept and Its Operationalization.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38C(1): 63-84

McGeer, V. 2005. “Out of the Mouths of Autistics: Subject Report and Its Role in Cognitive Theorising.” in A. Brook & K. Akins (eds.) Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2004 and earlier

Greene, J. D. & Cohen J. D. 2004. “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B (Special Issue on Law and the Brain) 359: 1775-1785.

the handbook

John M. Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group. The Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

“The Moral Psychology Handbook offers a survey of contemporary moral psychology, integrating evidence and argument
from philosophy and the human sciences. The chapters cover major issues in moral psychology, including moral reasoning, character,
moral emotion, positive psychology, moral rules, the neural correlates of ethical judgment, and the attribution of moral responsibility.
Each chapter is a collaborative effort, written cooperatively by leading researchers in the field.”